This solar requirement has been a long time coming. I haven’t looked at the new standard, it’s called Title 24 2019 because it’s still under development but they might just pushing the energy budget low enough that solar is effectively required. Otherwise it may be required for prescriptive title 24 compliance. The article talks about square footage and 2kW minimum systems which to me sounds like the prescriptive requirement.
Personally I’ve never been able to use prescriptive for design reasons but some contractors for sure do, and they don’t understand the concept of modeling.
So yeah, you can innovate all you want and CA set it up that way for years now.
[1] http://docketpublic.energy.ca.gov/PublicDocuments/17-BSTD-01...
While I instinctively agree, does anyone know of any research in this area?
I can speculate about possible downsides to legislating a performance specification rather than a solution: Giving people every possible option could result in people gaming the system, it could hamper investment because it creates uncertainty about what the future solution will be, or it could simply reduce transparency because the specification may be written to favor one solution anyway. That's just speculation, however; we need data and expertise.
Perhaps we should discourage people from building in shady places, but that would have a side effect of encouraging people to build where they need more AC.
A more market-based approach might be to just tax electrical use higher. Unfortunately, that would be a very regressive tax. (I don't live in California, but I understand you have or used to have a sort of sliding scale, where if you use more energy than average you pay a higher rate per kwh.)
Another option would be to require new power generation to be built along with new construction, but allow builders to decide how to do that and allow them to share power generation. For instance, a developer building a hundred houses might put solar on each house or they might build (or buy a partial stake in) a solar farm or wind turbine being built outside of town where land is cheap. The tricky part there is to ensure that any new power generation is actually being built specifically for the new construction, and builders aren't just piggybacking on power generation that would have been built anyways.
Which is exactly why mandating a specific solution like rooftop solar doesn't make sense. Your counterargument actually somewhat supports the original argument :)
Forcing solar on a house like that is suboptimal, forcing a certain generation metric is even worse.
Not good either. Just let people pay for what they use. Each person can decide how to optimize for his or her needs.
It could work for rentals if there was enough empty places that people could be picky about the energy efficiency of the houses they rent, but that's likely not the current situation.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/buy-sell-your-home/energy-performance-cer...
There are a lot of nutjobs running around saying they want Coal back, the President of the United States, for example, despite Coal being more expensive than Solar now.
So, to answer your question in earnest, Fossil Fuel Energy Companies and their bought-and-paid elected officials.
The people that want less energy for more (immediate) money are the people that want external costs priced into retail energy prices, but that's just because they don't want environmental damage to be treated as a non-cost.
This is great but has the unfortunate side-effect of some energy suppliers telemarketing to try to get you to switch to their "lower rates", which inevitably increase again after a few months.
So check the system in your state, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Part of the decision-making basket you evaluate in deciding to live somewhere includes the cost of energy with the cost of its externalities.
Another way to do it is to tax it when the utility buys it. This moves the math around for where they source power from.
Most people don't realize that if you tax the externalities, that is basically a regressive tax on the poor.
Wealthy people typically have a larger carbon footprint than those who aren't well off. Think flights, buying a car more frequently, etc.
If everyone has the same carbon footprint, the tax is strictly neutral. If people have different footprints, money flows from polluters to non-polluters.
That's easy, occupant must follow recommended behavior.
And be glad that Genetic Control is not issuing a four foot restriction on Humanoid height.
Your point isn't incorrect, but it's at best misplaced and mistimed. You should have been yelling about this when the law was being written, not now that it's passed. To those of us who care about the subject, your pedantry is harmful, not helpful.
If a bad law is bad, we should definitely continue to criticize it, if only for the purpose of influencing FUTURE laws.
Its a drop in the bucket of NIMBYism tho.
The decision to implement California car emissions standards was not a heavy handed or half baked idea. The Rand corporation was called in to help figure out a solution other than catalytic converter and the ultimate decision was signed off by Ronald "not a fan of regulation" Reagan. Not only have there been improvements in the catalytic converter but also there's this company called Tesla that has innovated and provided an alternative. Your suggestion of goals was implemented in the last administration and is in the process of being removed. Lobbyists kill goals/limits.
A total net power draw is regulating the users behavior. Is that what you want?
Smaller windows or better insulation...? While home A/C is a factor, this is not about the user. This is about clean power for California (whether it's effective at producing the power is a different conversation). Users can still get better insulation or smaller windows or innovate as they see fit. California had two nuclear reactors. It has shut them down. This legislation (which I didn't know about till today) is one in a long string of movements toward cleaner air starting back in 1967.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/about/history
An unrelated note, I hear all this talk about money As others have said, this is an economic non-starter for a home in California. One thing that has not been mentioned is that currently home appraisers do not consider solar panels in the value of a home.
You can't really call Tesla an alternative to regular cars with a price point of $80K (plus options, plus taxes). I know there are people in Silicon Valley who have so much money that $80k is like pocket change to them, but even in SV that's a minority. In the meantime, I've bought a car for $2k several years ago and it still runs (admittedly, it required some repairs on the way, but still).
> home appraisers do not consider solar panels in the value of a home.
Insurers do, as I recently found out. So maybe appraisers will catch up too.
You bought a car for $2k, but it was a used car. The fair comparison might be a Nissan Versa S, the cheapest new car in America at $12,780. Or maybe your car has more features than that, I don't know. That still puts the Model 3 at a multiple of the cost of that car, but hardly to an insane extent. Hell, in California you can, today, with rebates (yes, you have to pay some money up front) buy a new BMW i3 for about $22k. Of course, that's a particularly limited electric car, but then again, it also has features a $12,780 Nissan Versa does not, so you could argue the Versa is also limited.
We're not there yet, but we're getting there.
Actually a better argument from your point would be that the mandatory reverse cameras, airbags, safety cells, safety belts, ABS, etc, make new cars more expensive than they SHOULD be. In many countries you can get a brand new car for way less than $12,780. Of course, it's less safe and pollutes more than the new car you buy in the US, but there's a tradeoff in price.
Then again, that tradeoff trickles down to the used market, and pretty soon you have a $2k used car that HN buyers can buy, which is safer, cleaner, and more fuel efficient than an equivalent used car in a 2nd world country.
Or at least, that's how it works in theory.
This is a good thing. You'd be hard pushed to claim it has brought the prices of cars up.
Likewise if all new houses must have solar, it's just going to become the norm and everyone will benefit. Bravo!
I wish Australia had made double glazed windows mandatory (as well as solar panels). Alas, most people (well, at least politicians) have no idea what you're talking about, and prices are way up there.
I live in a house built in 1920s. Ever seen someone driving a Model T?
That was kinda my point :)
* Increases the cost of homes
* Gives solar power industry a boost in a way that's hard to get rid of--they will lobby to keep this even if other industries are around and it'll probably never change
* No incentive to research new energy technology in the meantime
And decreases the energy bill by a very similar amount of what an increase in the mortgage would be if the cost was 100% passed on. Regardless, in much of California the price of homes has little to do with the cost of building them. So another possibility is buildable land gets a little cheaper because building is more expensive and homes are priced by what the market will bear, not by material cost.
Let us assume that there is simply a hardware expense because the builders already have roofers and electricians. It’s such a fraction of a mouse fart (as mentioned) that going solar will essentially pay for itself after 2 years.
I can see builders charging a premium for the "electric car package" or the "double your consumption" service but something like 3W of production for each square foot per month would be amazing.
Sure, this is true iff a) the home has a nice south-facing roof, b) without trees in the way and c) under the current tariff design in most of California.
Some homes are built in wooded areas. Deciduous trees on the south side of the house (in the northern hemisphere) 1) shade in the summer, 2) allow the sun to warm in the winter are 3) are attractive.
Finally, regulated-monopoly utilities will continue to pass their costs to their customers. They will change the designs of their rates to continue to recoup their costs. So what might be saved in utilities costs today won't necessarily be saved over the life of the mortgage.
In a narrow sense; TCO, however, may be lower. (EDIT: TFA itself indicates +$9500 new home cost, -$19,000 30-year electricity cost as the average impact.)
> Gives solar power industry a boost in a way that's hard to get rid of--they will lobby to keep this even if other industries are around and it'll probably never change
Sure, the solar lobby will seek to preserve this as is as the landscape changes. Competing industries will seek either to remove or broaden it to accommodate other approaches to the same policy objective. The homebuilding industry lobbied against it, and it still was passed. “One industry will lobby to keep it” does not imply “it will never change”, or the past absence of the rule would never have changed.
> No incentive to research new energy technology in the meantime
Even with 100% residential solar deployment—not just on new construction—there’s a lot of energy demand that doesn't cover and plenty of incentive to find an efficient way of meeting that demand.
If homes had to be built to a better standard by legislature (Better insulation, or solar roofing, or whatever), it would, in the long term, drive down the price of land, but keep home prices similar.
Not to mention that you cannot retrofit solar panels on a home at the same interest rate as you can get on a mortgage. Forcing banks to lend money for these installations actually makes it cheaper for the homeowner.
Being specific has disadvantages, but the big advantage is that most decisions can be made by contractors reading the code instead of requiring an (expensive) engineering calculation. Engineering can be 1/3 of the cost of a remodel as it is. Increasing the engineering cost gives a big advantage to tract home builders who can amortize the engineering across a subdivision, which results in suburban malaise.
For instance, current energy codes require a certain R-value of insulation in walls, so that any contractor can go to Home Depot and buy the insulation marked with that R value and expect it to pass inspection. If the code said "Homes may only lose X BTU/year through all surfaces" it'd require a lot of engineer time per house to work it all out.
It's great that solar has evolved from being so expensive that it could only be installed in the most carefully optimized system, to something where you can just slap a few panels on a roof and expect reasonable results.
To reduce transmission losses, among other reasons.
> California has vast desert areas to tile with solar panels at less expense.
Even if it would be less build/maintenance expense per unit of delivered energy, a lot of California's vast deserts are either federally protected, and so not available even if it was smart to use them otherwise or already being irrigated and used for agriculture. You can't really cover a farm with solar panels without killing it's function like you can a house.
It's true that they more frequently get modified, often repeatedly and radically, until little trace of the original remains.
But anyhow, this isn't a law it's a regulation, and regulations are somewhat more likely to be removed (sometimes, because removal or even modification of the law under which the regulation was adopted forces this, independent of what the regulator would choose without that constraint.)
Another example is the EU regulation on incandescent bulbs. Stops people buying what they always did and helps pushing prices down for alternatives.
So it may be the case that the time and political capital spent on this path foreclosed other options and end up creating a rigid solution that prevents creativity in achieving the goals.
I also think there should be a progressive component to the requirement. The standards could be looser for a $100K house vs a $1M house or perhaps a progressive tax credit of some kind.
One exciting thing about this is that the costs of solar will be much lower for solar than otherwise. All homebuilders will have to make their designs solar ready, soft costs such as customer acquisition will be lower for solar companies, economies of scale, etc.
FWIW: very, very few houses (especially in CA where the overwhelming bulk of homes are built in arid biomes with very short trees!) have roofs that are actually shaded. A "shady house" means a house with trees nearby that shade the yard and the periphery of the roof. Take a look at Google Maps for your neighborhood for proof of this. The roofs are sunny almost always.
Consider that Germany has plenty of locations lucky to get 1-2 hours of direct sunlight per day and yet it has outpaced the US for many years.
New construction surrounded by redwood trees would probably still be able to justify solar thermal panels on the roof in addition to PV's, because it might make off-grid construction possible.
How do you rectify the free market innovation that was the VW/Audi/Porsche diesel scandal? There are mandated emissions requiments and the businesses are free to innovate solutions to meet them. Result: they just lied and cheated, in support of a specific technology that simply can’t meet the requirements but that they had made a century long commitment to. And became the largest car company in the world while doing it. How do you prevent net power draw regs from a) not resulting in just shitty home construction b) not encouraging cheating, many materials might not even be sourced from the US (like Canadian lumber) if you have to factor net energy into construction and c) not resulting in homes that require aftermarket additions like air conditioners which would in turn require new regulations? Or worse, really jacking up home prices when you simply can’t build new homes. what if you buy a house but then operate it differently than expected? Energy star numbers on TVs are this way, there are some really efficient TVs but nobody hardly ever operates their tv at those most efficient brightness settings, the viewing sucks.
It seems like you might want to reevaluate the rules in 10 years, it’s part of a big energy initiative they are taking on though. There is also room for a ton of grid innovation to make this work out reasonably. This law seems pretty simple in terms of the bigger goals the state has.
This is why ideas like this are stupid. There are lots of open fields where we could put solar panels, and the gains from putting them directly on houses are close to none.
Say it costs $100 to install the solar roof. What if I were to invest the same $100 in a company that is building solar farms in Nevada and providing that electricity to California ? Wouldn't that give additional benefit to the planet ?
What if you expand from solar to all renewable including R&D labs ?
When you build a house in bay area you already more efficient because of relatively moderate temperature than the farmer's home in Fresno or Lake Shasta.
I think the politicians who get voted in power because of bay area yuppies have forgotten that their state is also an agricultural state with many hardworking people.
Having one solution required means you can’t innovate to find a cheaper or better solution to the same problem.
The answer in this context would be to require a total net power draw for the home. Adding a production unit just gives more room in the calculation and not having one might mean more expensive insulation or smaller windows are needed instead.